Friday, February 13, 2015

When Jesus Became God

During my senior year in college Fr. Jerome, later Abbot Jerome,
introduced us to historical-critical study of scripture. It was the permission
I needed to begin my lifelong quest in search of what’s wrong and what’s right in
religion. I’m not satisfied learning something for myself, I want others to
know the fascinating truth too.

I have read hundreds of books on Christian teaching and its
evolvement, none clearer than Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the
Last Days of Rome. It reads like a thriller novel, full of suspense and violence,
hostile accusations, and surprising plot twists. But these events really
happened; they were not contrived for a novel. Here I continue the tale started
in the previous post.

The first followers of Jesus were mesmerized by his unique
teaching and, to use a modern term, his charisma. He seemed to have a
privileged connection with God. Like all shamans, he put people in touch with
Holiness. Jesus did not think he was God, and he did not tell people he was. After
he died, his followers broadcast his teachings or what they perceived to be his
teachings. His first followers did not pray to Jesus or think of him as God. Scripture
does not teach this either, contrary to popular Christian belief and religious
teachings given me in the first part of my life.

Writings by Jesus-followers did not begin to treat him as
God until around the beginning of the 2nd century—around the year
100 CE—and this belief grew between the 2nd to 4th
centuries. According to Rubenstein,

Arianism, which orthodox Christians now consider the archetypal heresy, was once at least
as popular as the doctrine that Jesus is God.

Walter Bauer, whom I read before Rubenstein—both probably in
the 1990s—corroborates this statement in Orthodoxy
and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. On the basis of Bauer’s evidence, I
believe the majority of Christians in
the first three centuries did not worship Jesus as God. They were committed to
Jesus Christ and considered themselves orthodox Christians but did not equate
Jesus with God.

The road to Jesus becoming God involved Roman emperors, Catholic
bishops fighting each other, and mobs fighting over theological issues in the
streets, all contributing generous amounts of violence. Ultimately, writes
Rubenstein, it was the lay masses who would decide the issue.

Before Constantine’s well-known conversion to their faith,
Christians in the Empire were in trouble for refusing to perform their civic
duty by participating in rites of the old religion. Emperors before Constantine
tried to terrorize them into submission but that only resulted in more
conversions to Christianity.

It attracted Roman citizens for three reasons. Instead of demanding
external motions in stale Roman rites without meaning, Christianity

expressed a new sense of interiority:
the perception of an inner space in which an individual could . . . communicate
with God, and discover his or her own spiritual identity.

While wealthy Romans abandoned the poor, bureaucrats
enriched themselves at the expense of their subjects, and military chiefs
overthrew their emperors, Christian bishops and their congregations fed the
hungry, housed the homeless, cared for plague victims, and offered sufferers
membership in a tight-knit, compassionate community.

Women, in fact, were the Christians’ secret weapon . . . “It
is highly likely that women were a clear majority in the churches of the third
century.”

These three attractions of early Christianity often are missing
in institutional religion today. Think about it: Orders from the hierarchy
today focus on externals and lack depth, media reports of morally-bankrupt clergy
are common, and women are denied leadership. These are reasons Christians leave
the church and find a different spiritual path—the reverse of what happened
when people in the Roman Empire were drawn to Christian churches.

Our times differ in another respect. Americans will find it
hard to understand the mix of religion and politics during the last centuries
of the Roman Empire when emperors were religious leaders and bishops were
political leaders. Add the murderous doctrinal conflicts between bishops and
mobs fighting over the relationship between the Father and the Son, and you see
the difference between that time and ours.

Our contemporary term “to act like a Christian” denigrates
people of other faiths as well as atheists, whom I know to be at least as morally
upright as Christians. But Christians of the first centuries deserved the
meaning it had then, and women had a lot to do with this.

Ironically, about the time Christianity became the official religion
of the Empire, its disagreements over right belief were turning it into a
scandal rather than a model of right living. Constantine called the Council of
Nicaea in 325 to direct his Empire into peace and harmony but relations turned
even more contentious. The great Arian controversy roiled the Empire until 381.

To summarize the
theological dispute, Arians distinguished between the divinity of Jesus and the
divinity of the transcendent God. They thought of Christ as representing God, not being God. As proof texts from scripture
they used “No one is good but God alone” (Mk 10:18) and “He who sent me is
greater than I” (Jn 14:28).

Anti-Arians used as proof texts “I and the Father are one”
(Jn 10:30) and “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Led by Athanasius, anti-Arians insisted on a
complete identification of Jesus with God.
Officially, Arianism remains a declared
heresy but I believe Catholic theologians today are more Arian than anti-Arian.

Again I interrupt this tale because it’s getting long. More
about the fascinating 4th century next time.

February 25, Islam out of Arianism?

As a systematics major in the School of Theology, I studied
belabored explanations of how God can be three in one, and I followed the
arguments of many “heresies.” I learned how the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil,
Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus—tried to resolve the Arian controversy and
put an end to theological disputes by explicating distinctions and definitions.
Their formula—three persons or separate individuals (hypostaseis) in one substance (ousia)—did
not explain how Jesus could be both human and divine to the satisfaction of
everyone, particularly in the Eastern part of the Empire.

Before my theological studies I had already read some Jung
and some Teilhard de Chardin, which helped me to realize that all sides in
the disputes were hampered by dualism, which envisions vast separation
between God and creation.
Departing from dualism, Teilhard and Jung see Inner and Outer as aspects of
the same reality. God is not an entity separate from the universe or from us. Christ
represents the divinity in all human beings.

I admire the Cappadocians for what they did, but their
vision was confined by the limited horizon of their time.

Our time has shrunk
the globe. We have the knowledge of other traditions.

Christians are not alone in having a trinity. Pagans,
Hindus, Buddhists, and many others also have trinities, indicating a mysterious
Threeness in our three-dimensional universe. It tends toward 3-fold structures:
animal, vegetable, and mineral; liquid, solid, and gas; larve, pupa, and butterfly;
past, present, and future; red, yellow, and blue. This tendency toward
Threeness alluded to by religions does not necessarily define the nature of the
Source we call God. Science today is pointing toward the possibility of other
universes with dimensions foreign to us.

The Cappadocian formula was not immediately accepted in the
ancient world. What really settled the Arian controversy was threatening hordes
advancing on the Empire in the north. This eventually led to the disintegration
of the Empire, a long story not essential to this theological dispute.
Essential to it is the contrasting emphases between the two theological
movements.

Arianism had a higher opinion of humanity than
anti-Arianism. Arius’s more human Jesus was “sent not so much to rescue
helpless humans as to inspire them to develop their own potential for
divinity,” writes Rubenstein. This is close to current Christian teaching.

But in the last centuries of the Roman Empire, this
optimistic view of humanity did not assure people who were alarmed by the
menace threatening their world. They wanted a more God-like Christ and “a cadre
of religious specialists” offering physical and spiritual security. Forget the
invitations to be like Christ; they wanted to rely on a mighty Christ.

In 380 the Emperor Theodocius outlawed Arianism. A purge
followed.

Arians and other heretics were forbidden to occupy any
church or meet together for worship . . .

Arian views . . . would become crimes punishable by death.

Fanaticism ensued. When Theodocius ordered that restitution
be made to Jews and “heretics” who had been wronged, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan,
objected—Jews and heretics had no rights. The emperor rescinded the order
because Ambrose threatened excommunication.

The Empire continued to experience a rift between East and
West. Eastern bishops tended to assert that the Father was greater than the
Son. To people in the West, the Nicene Creed meant that Christ (understood as
Jesus) was God, a simplistic understanding misrepresenting the Cappadocian
distinctions.

After Theodocius, the East-West split in the Roman Empire
hardened. Constantinople ignored the excommunications coming from Rome.

Since the Arian Visigoths converted the Burgundians,
Vandals, and several other “barbarian” peoples to their faith, Arianism would
remain for the time a significant religious movement in the lands that the
tribesmen conquered. . . .

Arianism was now identified with the “barbarians” who were
its main advocates.

Rubenstein concludes,

Nicene Christianity, with its majestic Christ incorporated
into the Godhead,

its pessimistic view of human nature, and its bishops and
saints playing dominant roles,

was better suited to express the hopes and fears of
Christians in an age of unpredictable change and lowered social expectations.

Typical piety in the Western world accepted as truth that
Jesus is God. Until modern times. Today my readers send me emails repudiating
it.

For me the greatest Ah-hah moment in Rubenstein’s book came
at the end. In a few centuries, most of the Eastern world—the one uneasy about
elevating the Son to the level of the Father—would be swept into a new
religion.

The Islamic Jesus was not the incarnate God of Nicene
Christianity or the super-angelic Son of the Arians. . . . he was a divinely
inspired man: a spiritual genius ranking with the greatest prophets, Moses and
Mohammed himself.

The Arian controversy serves as a backdrop that enhances the
Muslim prayer to One God. I have no intention of converting to Islam but I also
think of Jesus as a spiritual genius, not God. Christian theology is progressing in this direction.

1 comment:

The reason why I keep commenting here is because my experience has been the exact opposite of the views expressed at this blog. To my lights, an objective and dispassionate look at the evidence does not support the revisionist account that is presented here. It is true that the interiority that you eluded to is not front and center in the tradition, but that certainly doesn't mean it isn't there. Also, your preference for nondual metaphysics is a personal bias- nothing more. Moreover, your anti-traditional social/moral commitments strike me as a strain of modern secular humanism, certainly not transcendental humanism.

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